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From: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2016 09:10:45 -0800
Message-ID: <CALCETrVS_t+sHNSL=eDP_yRU0w78rKUT=JAXOxHd-J5=SwwQBQ@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Formal description of system call interface
To: Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@google.com>
Cc: Linux API <linux-api@vger.kernel.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
        Sasha Levin <levinsasha928@gmail.com>,
        Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>, scientist@fb.com,
        Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>,
        "Carlos O'Donell" <carlos@redhat.com>,
        syzkaller <syzkaller@googlegroups.com>,
        Kostya Serebryany <kcc@google.com>, Mike Frysinger <vapier@google.com>,
        Dave Jones <davej@codemonkey.org.uk>,
        Tavis Ormandy <taviso@google.com>
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On Sun, Nov 6, 2016 at 2:39 PM, Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@google.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> This is notes from the discussion we had at Linux Plumbers this week
> regarding providing a formal description of system calls (user API).
>
> The idea come up in the context of syzkaller, syscall fuzzer, which
> has descriptions for 1000+ syscalls mostly concentrating on types of
> arguments and return values. However, problems are that a small group
> of people can't write descriptions for all syscalls; can't keep them
> up-to-date and doesn't have necessary domain expertise to do correct
> descriptions in some cases.
>
> We identified a surprisingly large number of potential users for such
> descriptions:

Let me add one more: consolidation of all the incompatible arch
syscall tables.  A sufficiently descriptive format should be parseable
at build time to generate the syscall tables.